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Ok so then we drop this law and 20 or so years down the road (maybe less) they will have such a massive amount of debt in regards too their pensions and healthcare plans. GUESS WHO WILL HAVE TO PAY FOR THAT?

You should do the reading before responding. The Post Office wasn't operating at a deficit. The only money the Post Office gets from the Federal Govt are payments to cover special requirements that the government has placed upon it. That's not a deficit it's a fee for services.

While you were hanging yourself , on someone else's words
Dying to believe in what you heard
I was staring straight into the shining sun

You should do the reading before responding. The Post Office wasn't operating at a deficit. The only money the Post Office gets from the Federal Govt are payments to cover special requirements that the government has placed upon it. That's not a deficit it's a fee for services.

I read that they were running at a 5 billion dollar deficit before anything other problem.

Yes, they should work for every penny of it in a free and open market rather than in their communist bubble.

So what are you saying about NJcardfan? I believe he said that he makes about $30/hr and has to pay a contribution towards his benefits which people making $10/hr often pay. The pay for a corrections officer in Maryland, a short drive south of New Jersey, is $13.85/hr. Surely there is somewhere in the US which pays even less for the same work.

Should we then move on to ODY? As I understand what he does, it translates almost literally to some civilian applications. Shall we do away with Ody's longevity pay, benefits, and early retirement eligibility simply because there is someone somewhere who is willing to do his job for less?

You want Walmart greeters for corrections officers, cops, and military personnel? We can do that. We probably won't like the outcome, but we can do that. And if we do that we'll have the same thing here that you have in some Third World countries, where military supplies disappear out back doors, cops steal, and prison guards can be paid off for special treatment.

My apologies to those who have been kind enough to tell us too much about their work. I would have used other people as examples, but it's not clear exactly who here is a government employee and who isn't.

While you were hanging yourself , on someone else's words
Dying to believe in what you heard
I was staring straight into the shining sun

Years ago I loved using the postal service's priority mail. The price was right and it was easier to ship items from my small town in Illinois and they arrived undamaged. That has changed in the last few years.

I must admit my current town has a pretty good post office. Our normal postal carrier at work, will actually wait and ask if she has a pick up notice and does not see anything to pick up. She is very patient even when we are slammed with business. That is pretty good service. Much better then UPS in our area.

Yeah! Damn those people for their decent wages and benefits! They should all do whatever it is that you do.

Several incorrect assumptions here. First, you are assuming that the unions are the sole driver for wages and benefits, but cartels/unions suppress employment by limiting the supply of labor, and the benefits that are extorted through the threat of violent strikes result in lower employment, at least in the private sector. In the public sector, where profitability and efficiency aren't issues, the constant influx of increasing amounts of tax dollars offsets the increased costs of hiring and bloated job numbers, but cushions the impacts of poor services on the providers. Thus, public education can produce millions of functionally illiterate kids every year, but the number of teachers fired is miniscule. The Postal Service can lose millions of pieces of mail, have numerous scandals involving letter carriers tossing the mail or have all sorts of deficits and still be kept going by infusions of cash from congress.

You cited Ben Franklin as the creator of the Postal System, and demanded that we keep it going for his sake, but Franklin was one of the most practically-minded men who ever lived, and he'd have been appalled at your use of his name to keep something going that was failing. Franklin would have suggested looking at the problems that have plagued the Post Office for decades, rather than simply buying off on the propaganda that Huffpo is spewing at the behest of federal unions.

I provided one possible fix, which you (typically) ignored, but aside from demanding more money, I don't see you offering any solutions to the biggest problems facing the Post Office, which are the rise of competition, new technologies that make many postal functions obsolete, a refusal to reorganize its workforce and an antiquated pricing system. For example, the majority of mail that gets delivered to most homes is bulk junk mail. Instead of charging less for bulk mail, the Postal Service ought to be increasing the prices for those mailings, especially since the vast majority of people who get them unsolicited end up tossing them. You've complained about corporate welfare, but subsidized bulk rate postage for unsolicited mail is an obvious example of the government paying for corporate advertising. Another area, which would reduce some costs, is congressional franking, the practice of allowing unlimited communications between members of congress and their constituents. Franking is now an unlimited campaign expenditure in which incumbents can deluge their districts with mail, while their competitors have to pay for the privilege. Also, because franked mail is printed at government expense, the senders can afford massive waste, so they hit every address in a district, whether or not there is a registered voter there, while challengers have to target their mailers. Limiting mass franking to one or two times per year, or at the close of each legislative session, would be a big step in reforming two areas of government, postal abuses and campaign abuses, that desperately need it. Finally, with the advent of e-mail, text messages and live internet chats, physical mail is becoming less and less necessary. Once the bulk rates reflect actual costs, the price of actual letters can do the same (increasing revenues per letter delivered), and the decreased volume can be handled by a smaller workforce, which can be achieved through attrition. There are lots of ways that the Postal Service can economize and make itself profitable, but as long as Uncle Sugar is providing a financial buffer, there's no incentive to change.

Finally, with the advent of e-mail, text messages and live internet chats, physical mail is becoming less and less necessary.

There's an irony to this as you can buy stamps online. You don't have to go to the post office for anything anymore. Personally, I might mail something with a stamp on it maybe 10 times a year, everything else I do either in person or online so I use approximately $4.60 on stamps per year and I'm not alone in that. I do think that the USPS provides a necessary function, one of the few federal functions that make sense. I think one of their biggest issues is in the packaging business. For some reason they can't seem to compete with the private delivery companies even though they are cheaper and reliable as long as you don't need something delivered tomorrow. But when UPS and FEDEX got into the letter delivering business and did it more reliably(albeit at a much smaller scale), this is when they started kicking the USPS's behind. I think if they focused more on packaging at a lower cost as long as it isn't a rush delivery(which most packages are not), and advertised as such, they'd start turning a tidy profit but instead of doing what any business would do, they pull silly stunts like limiting delivery or raising prices on a product that is little used(stamps) instead of changing their business model.